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To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Age: 89 †
Born: 1918
Born: December 11
Died: 2008
Died: January 1
Historian
Militant
Military Personnel
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Public Figure
School Teacher
Screenwriter
Writer
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
First
Must
People
Sever
Destroy
Roots
Education
Firsts
More quotes by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Any fool can bomb a train, but just try sorting out the mess.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Should one point out that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy to take a step you would reproach yourself for-all this freed the prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled him.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Surely people should eventually cease to be surprised at anything? And yet they continue to be.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
What would things been like [in Russia] if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there, paling with terror at every bang on the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Of course, my views developed in the course of time. But I have always believed in what I did and never acted against my conscience.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
If we live in a state of constant fear, can we remain human?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It's true that private enterprise is extremely flexible, But its only good within very narrow limits. If private enterprise isn't held in an iron grip it gives birth to people who are no better than beasts, those stock-exchange people with greedy appetites beyond restraint.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
When I was young, the early death of my father cast a shadow over me - and I was afraid to die before all my literary plans came true. But between 30 and 40 years of age my attitude to death became quite calm and balanced. I feel it is a natural, but no means the final, milestone of one's existence.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
How can you expect a man who's warm to understand one who's cold?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
... some kind of clean, pure feeling does live within us, existing apart from all our convictions.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Truth must be told-and things must change! If words are not about real things and do not cause things to happen, what is the good of them?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Who will dare say he has defined art?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Work was like a stick. It had two ends. When you worked for the knowing you gave them quality when you worked for a fool you simply gave him eyewash.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society . . . loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
We will die, but art will remain.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn